The 365 Commitment

We are all going to be software developers in the next fifteen years. I know that is hard to believe, but I think that is where we are headed. Not because everyone will suddenly learn Python or spend their days building applications, but because more and more of our work will involve humans directing and guiding systems to produce the results we want. In that sense, we will all be doing systems de...

Be wary, modern traveler. One of the oldest habits of the human mind is also one of the easiest to miss. When confronted with ambiguity, complexity, or something we cannot fully explain, we give it a name. The name helps because it takes something shapeless and puts a boundary around it. It gives us something we can talk about, warn others about, blame, and sometimes even treat. The danger comes l...

Tyler. That is the name of my autonomous agent. I named him Tyler, based on the alter ego in the movie Fight Club. Seemed somehow appropriate. Tyler started out simple enough. I wanted to experiment with using some of the new agent systems out there to build one that could handle tasks for me that I did not want to do. Research a topic while I was sleeping, outline my meeting notes in preparation...

Years ago, I remember reading about this team that had discovered that homing pigeons were starting to adopt our roadways as navigational guides to find their way back home. This was startling because homing pigeons have a natural instinct that guides them back home, but over time, and in the right circumstances, the pigeons had adapted to using the more reliable method of following human roadways...

A fascinating book to read, if you can find a copy of it, was a book created by Studs Terkel in 1974 called 'Working.' This book was developed through several questions from this Chicago radio host, who moonlighted as an oral historian. He interviewed over 100 people in a wide variety of occupations and just let them speak for themselves. He did not ask them the typical types of things, like, "Wha...

An interesting exercise to go through next time that you are feeling out of sorts is to ask yourself, "What exactly am I feeling?" Surprisingly, many of us are not capable of making any distinction between feeling ashamed versus feeling anxious. We simply lack the vocabulary; we just simply call it "not feeling good." I am not sure why this is the case; in raising three children, I noticed when th...

This discussion is a nod to the work by Barbara Fredrickson and Daniel Kahneman. In their 1993 paper, Duration Neglect in Retrospective Evaluations of Affective Episodes , Fredrickson and Kahneman contrasted two ways the mind might evaluate an experience. One possibility is that memory works something like a movie: we mentally integrate the experience over time. If an unpleasant experience lasts t...

A few years ago, I set a goal to achieve an ultra marathon before my 50th birthday. My goal was to run a 100-miler, but I did not quite hit that objective. Instead, I went for the "50 before 50" target. I would run a 50-mile marathon before my 50th birthday. I was successful, and one of the techniques that I used during the run was to mentally focus on areas in my body where I felt pain. I would e...

I have three children, two of whom are now adults. When we started having kids, we made a conscious decision not to let them have unfettered access to the Internet and, therefore, social media by handing them phones to keep with them at all times. We let them have old-school devices, but not mini-computers they could carry around with them everywhere they went. This was not a popular decision. My...

I woke up this morning with the walking blues. A feeling that can only be resolved by walking around. You wake up, feel around for your shoes, and just start walking. You let all the things that have been tumbling around in your head move around with you for a while. When I finished my walk, I came home and played some blues music. I sat there feeling melancholy but, at the same time, rejuvenated....

My wife and her friends are having a summit today. To help one of their dear friends figure out a way to improve her prospects of finding a partner to date and hopefully get married to. I was casually listening in on the conversation every once in a while when I went into steal snacks from the spread my wife put out for everyone. Although there were many opinions being expressed, the one universal...

I actually love opera. I like the music, the drama, the history, and the sheer theatrical excess of it. I like that a story can take three hours to tell and that nobody seems particularly concerned about efficiency. Yet for some reason, saying “I love opera” can feel slightly more revealing than saying I like a particular restaurant or football team. That feeling interests me because opera itself...

We are rapidly heading into a world where it is getting easier and cheaper to automate things. I will provide an example. One day I got a notice from Google that my entire investment in their Nest architecture was going away. They made a decision to get out of this business after they bought it and started deprioritizing this whole Google Home initiative. Now, I know they are pretending to still d...

In my life experience, speed usually wins. There seems to be two general approaches in life, whether it be business, technology, or even sporting events. You can be careful and steady or you can be fast and more reckless. This is note a fast beats slow observation, but I can certainly say with absolutely certainty that speed usually wins. The question is why? The system that can act, receive feedb...

My intellectual journey has led me to a profound bias toward iterative thinking. This approach, at its core, follows a simple yet powerful cycle: Try, observe, learn, adjust, and then try again. This stands in stark contrast to the linear thinking that characterized my younger years: Analyze, decide, execute, and finish. The philosophical chasm between these two methodologies can be distilled into...

There is a peculiar mystery to the relief that washes over us when we commit something to paper. A problem can haunt the mind for hours, even days, resurfacing relentlessly even when immediate action is impossible. Whether driving, dining, drifting to sleep, or engrossed in unrelated work, the thought reappears, as if the mind is a persistent sentinel, ensuring the issue remains unforgotten. Then,...

There once was a young man who believed he had been born for greatness. He did not want an ordinary life. He wanted riches, fame, and glory. He dreamed of building something so grand that people would speak his name long after he was gone. So he left home with ambition in his heart and certainty in his step. His first venture failed. He lost nearly everything he had saved, but he told himself that...

I want to begin with something Jesus said about prayer that I have been thinking about lately. In Matthew 6:7, Jesus says: “But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking.” That phrase caught my attention: “Vain repetitions.” Because repetition is actually a huge part of religious life. Christians repeat the Lord’s Pra...

Present bias is the tendency to overvalue rewards available now and undervalue larger benefits that arrive later. In plain terms, people often choose immediate comfort, pleasure, or relief even when waiting would produce a better overall outcome. Repeatedly choosing the immediate reward can make that pattern feel more automatic, more normal, and more compelling over time. In other words, present-b...

We often find ourselves either the victims or the perpetrators of the false choice, attempting to coerce others into selecting one option over another. This tactic is almost invariably a rhetorical maneuver, designed to dramatically underscore why our preferred option is the superior one. The reality, however, is that such choices are almost always illusory. The concept of the "false choice" or "f...

The software development world came to a screeching halt today when the runners hosted in GitHub suddenly stopped serving what are known as actions. About a 6- to 8-hour outage for probably one of the most heavily used services on the Internet. It definitely exposed a bottleneck for many development shops that are becoming increasingly dependent on agentic workflows that automate the process of ch...

I was on a call recently with the senior leader in an organization. During that call, a problem surfaced which we began discussing vigorously. One of the subordinates on the call was having a visible panic attack. She was horrified that a problem was being brought up in front of her leader in such a manner. No preparation. No triage. No cover story. Nothing, just plain, raw truth, unfiltered and r...

How can you motivate someone to work harder? I am in a unique position to answer this question, as I have worked and been a leader in small organizations, large public education, large public and private companies, and my own startups. I have battled with this question, and I have seen others battle with it too. I have read many books on the subject, and I can collectively distill that knowledge i...

A high school memory of a cassette tape, a broken rewind button, and the unexpected discovery of Led Zeppelin's "D'yer Mak'er" that changed everything.

Sometimes, feeling down is just part of the human experience. Learn to navigate these emotional ebbs and flows by recognizing them without judgment, continuing your commitments, and avoiding major decisions during low periods. This approach can lead to faster recovery and less intense downturns.